I have a list of phrases I’d like never to hear again: “People food.” “Dumped their pets at the shelter.” “Irresponsible pet owners.”
And here’s one more: “Unlicensed breeders.”
To understand just what’s wrong with that phrase, you might have to consider for a moment something that has nothing to do with dogs. Let’s try gardening.
You love orchids. You’ve been growing them for years, in a big kitchen window. Maybe you even have a greenhouse in the garden, a small plastic-walled building with controlled light, heat and humidity. You spend time out there every evening after work, and on the weekends. It relaxes you.
You also go to orchid shows, where you socialize and talk with other orchid growers. You belong to six orchid email lists, read a handful of orchid blogs, and have a t-shirt with “In the marsh pink orchid’s faces/With their coy and dainty graces/Lure us to their hiding places” on it.
After you’d been showing orchids for a few years, you began getting booths at a few orchid shows, and selling some of your best efforts — at least, the ones you could bear to part with. Orchid growing, cultivation, and preservation had become your life.
Then one day, your local city council determined that local orchid growers are using too much water, electricity, and other town resources. Some exotic orchids had escaped from cultivation and started to out-compete native orchids in the wild. The fertilizer used to make them bloom was putting a strain on the local sewage facility. And there was also the problem of sales tax — were some of these backyard-and-kitchen orchid growers cheating the state and county out of revenue?
In the way of lawmakers everywhere, the city council had come up with a plan: local residents needed to get a license to grow orchids. And because orchid growing is obviously a hobby of the elite, that license was going to cost, oh, five hundred bucks a year. And if you had a greenhouse out back? Double.
The huge orchid growers — the ones with their gigantic glass houses and insecticide misters and big trucks coming to take the orchids off to your local supermarket, where they would be purchased on impulse by someone who thought orchids were purty and had no more idea how to feed, water, or preserve them than they knew how to fly — were delighted. Oh, not that they really saw the little orchid fanatics as competition, but in these tough economic times, every dollar helped.
The home orchid growers freaked out. They didn’t have a lobby, had never thought of what they did as a business or something nefarious or dangerous. Why on earth were they suddenly being regulated? Who could have imagined such a thing?
So they talked and wrung their hands and posted passionately to their orchid lists. They vowed to bring all their orchids indoors, get shades that let in the light but blocked the view and start buying their orchid food out of town. After all, they reasoned, it’s not like the city would go door to door looking for them. Lay low, that’s the ticket.
That’s pretty much what happened in the world of hobby dog and cat breeding back in the 90s. And it keeps happening, because laying low continues to be the first response of most people when they perceive a threat. And laying low means no communication, no organization, and no dissent.
And just as the growers in my imaginary orchid world discovered that yes, the city really was going to go door to door and look for suspicious greenhouses and window shades and excessive use of electricity, hobby breeders realized that local animal control was actually going to come into their houses and check their kitchen cupboards and call their veterinarians to find out what kind of care their pets were getting and count noses to make sure limit laws weren’t being violated and monitor the number of poop piles in the backyard.
And like the orchid growers I invented, the hobby breeders had no lobby. They weren’t organized beyond the levels necessary to figure out who was going to be at the annual breed picnic every summer. They had no fund raising machine, no sense of “us against them,” no cultural identity that might have unified them. They were liberal and conservative, religious and atheist, old and young, and not in the habit of doing things like protesting or calling their legislators — or really, even knowing who they were.
They were caught entirely by surprise to find out that their local government thought they needed to trot down to City Hall and register their names, addresses, and numbers of pets, explain which animals had reproductive organs, pay extra for the privilege of letting them keep them, and humbly supplicate themselves before an animal control officer who couldn’t tell a Norfolk from a Norwich terrier, let alone judge which dog or bitch was breeding quality, in order to get permission to do what they and many generations before them had been doing for hundreds of years: have a litter of puppies or kittens.
Imagine their shock to further discover that this was happening in towns, counties and states all over the nation. That it was being driven by an aggressive campaign to end the breeding of cats and dogs, and that it was focusing its efforts not on the big factory farms of pet breeding but on the people doing it in their kitchens — the ones who had no lobby, no organizational structure, little skill at fighting back.
Now, let me ask you one question: is any of this a scenario under which you would feel comfortable going down and registering with the local authorities as an orchid grower, er, I mean, breeder? Or even as someone who has intact animals?
Because animal control has not shown itself to be your friend; to the contrary, in many places, animal control is hostile in the extreme to anyone who breeds or shows dogs or cats.
Your local city council members or state representatives have no understanding of what’s going on — probably even less than you do. So when someone suggests to them that restricting, licensing and legislating breeding will control animal suffering, reduce impact on the shelter system and bring in revenue, they’re all for it. When you tell them what’s really going on, they think you’re being paranoid. They say you’re a conspiracy theorist. So what trust you might have had in them is gone.
Even your friends who don’t raise orchids dogs or cats don’t understand why you’re so against this. If you have nothing to hide, they say, what does it matter that they want you to get a license, register with them, or let them come into your house and inspect your greenhouse kennel bedroom?
In vain you wave your copy of the United States Constitution in the air. Don’t you have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? Aren’t you supposed to be free of unreasonable searches?
That’s when their eyes narrow. So, they ask, do you have something to hide?
And that, dear readers, is why I’m against licensing dog and cat breeders. Because it’s intrusive, wrong, and it isn’t going to do what its proponents claim it will. It doesn’t increase revenue — to the contrary, San Mateo County found that its breeder licensing program decreased license compliance after they instituted it in the 90s. There is no evidence it decreases shelter numbers, and it does nothing but drive good, caring breeders underground or out of the hobby, surrendering their turf to the factory farms of pet breeding — who are, by the way, licensed breeders.
Of course, there’s at least one way in which this analogy is flawed. Orchids aren’t sentient creatures and don’t suffer if thrown on the compost pile or deprived of water and light. Nor is the orchid being tenderly raised in someone’s kitchen happier than an orchid being grown in a huge commercial greenhouse. (Well, I actually know a lot of gardeners who tell me that’s not true, but for the sake of argument, let’s say it is.)
But from the point of view of the dog or cat fancier, the analogy is pretty apt. Except that orchids don’t love you back the way dogs and cats do, so I’d say their passion for animals runs even deeper than the orchid grower’s passion for her plants.
Dogs and cats aren’t plants, and they deserve our protection. So by all means, let’s continue to have laws against the abuse and neglect of animals, and let’s actually try enforcing them, too.
But licensing dog and cat breeders does nothing but put a group of people who love dogs and cats — love them fiercely — at odds with those with whom they share the goal of seeing fewer animals die in shelters and improving the lives of dogs and cats. They end up hiding instead of running breed rescue groups and driving in transport relays for rescued animals and raising money for animal welfare and volunteering at the local shelter and whelping the puppies of pregnant rescued animals and fostering orphaned kittens.
So the next time you think it odd that dedicated small dog and cat breeders don’t want to be licensed, try to put yourself in their shoes, and ask: is this really a good idea? Does this really help animals? Or does it just frighten, intimidate, and anger animal lovers?
